We had a teacher at school who was a fighter pilot in WW2 and was shot down. When he lost his temper with us for playing around he said....'you lot do not know you are born!
We used to laugh at him and ridicule him. Now I know he was so right. We created this mess and gave it all away. Why is it we only realise this when we are older?
I had a history teacher who was captured by the Japanese on the first day of the war and held captive throughout the whole ordeal. He lived through a living hell. Teenagers can be assholes and he was known as Crazy Clay because he was a little off....rightfully so. Clayton Atwood captured in Guam December 11th. He shared some stories of being locked in a cage, they'd beat them, spit in their meager amounts of rice and water, humiliate them. poor dude...Personally he was very kind to me a couple of times...Wish I could thank him. Yep these freedoms we enjoy are due to their sacrifices and we can never now how much suffering and agony they endured..In trying to find some info on him today as I wrote this I stumbled upon this one article where Clay is breifly mentioned ...1,386 nights
Here's a link to the whole article...dang
1,386 Days and Nights
By the time Guam was attacked, all the medical personnel knew about the devastation in Shanghai and Nanking and at Pearl Harbor. When Guam surrendered on December 10, the Japanese came by the hospital compound and ordered Capt. Lineberry to limit his staff to 20 and move all patients and staff into a single ward. The other staff was to be moved to a nearby church. Marshall remained at the hospital working alongside Dr. Van Peenen and other hospital personnel.
On December 12th, the Japanese gathered 20 staff members including Marshall to the center of the hospital compound and lined them up in a row directly in front of a manned machine gun with another machine gun pointed at them on their right side.
“I had never been so scared in all my life,” Marshall remembered. ”I can truthfully say I know how it feels just before you are put to death. My heart was pounding. I could feel sweat running down my body.”
Instead of being shot they were instead given a long-winded propaganda speech. The trauma of that event later caused Marshall to “black out” and not remember anything for the next three weeks.
It was January 10, 1942 when Marshall and his fellow prisoners were finally removed from the hospital compound and gathered with other POWs from the island—including 300 American military personnel, 200 American civilians, five Navy nurses (including a future director of the Nurse Corps), a serviceman’s wife and her baby, and five Spanish priests. They were marched to the Piti Navy Yard and loaded onto Argentina Maru prison ship destined for Japan. The naval hospital Marshall had left ceased to exist at that point.
Arriving on the morning of January 15th, the prisoners were each given two slices of bread, ferried ashore without blankets or adequate clothing in the cold temperature and across the snowy landscape. The women and child were separated from the men who were photographed and then taken to Zentsuji prison camp, an old army barracks that had housed Russian prisoners during the Russo-Japanese War some forty years earlier. Officers were then separated from enlisted. Enlisted personnel (E-5 and below) were assembled into working parties and assigned to clear the land for planting crops and to work as stevedores loading box cars and ships. The Navy nurses were later exchanged for Japanese prisoners that year aboard the Swedish ship Gripsholm.
Marshall and 150 fellow POWs were relocated to Osaka in June 1942—first interned at the stadium quarters and then the notorious Osaka POW Camp No. 1. At that point, Marshall realized that he and the others were “in it for the long haul” and their plight was not going to be over soon. By the summer of 1942, he was one among 27,000 Americans facing forced labor, starvation, disease, and torture at Japanese prison camps. Forty percent of these American POWs never made it out of those camps.
Marshall served alongside Americans, Australians, British, Chinese, Dutch and Indians at Osaka. He again was assigned backbreaking duty as a stevedore transporting cargo onto ships and unloading freight onto train cars and trucks. At the camp Marshall began suffering respiratory problems. To be sure, showing any weakness was never good and only a limited number of prisoners were permitted to miss work to recuperate. For a time, a Navy pharmacist’s mate second class
(Clayton Atwood) ran a sick bay and held daily sick call for the prisoners. There was also a makeshift “hospital” at the stadium, but those who were sent there were often on their last legs and rarely returned. Among the prisoners it was believed that only ten percent of the patients sent to the hospital came back alive. When Marshall began suffering illness he tried to hide his condition as best he could for fear of being sent to the hospital.
